Akufo-Addo developing exit strategy to ‘return life to normalcy’

Government is developing an exit strategy to return life to normal, amid efforts to combat the spread of Covid-19 in Ghana.

At a meeting with the leadership of the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG), President Akufo-Addo was emphatic, the ban on social gathering, closure of borders cannot continue forever.

“These are not events that can be allowed to stay for a very long time. We need to find a way to bring them to an end and return to some form of normality,” he said while acknowledging the role of academia in this time of crisis.

Some weeks ago, government announced the closure of all educational institutions in the wake of the increasing number of novel coronavirus infections known to be accelerated by public gatherings.

Many institutions have migrated their course modules online to enable access to teaching and learning for the comfort of students’ homes.

According to the President, the administration is looking at improving existing measures to contain further, the spread of the virus while implementing a permanent solution to save the lives of Ghanaians.

“The progammes that we are now working on to see to how we can put together an exit strategy, is highly conditional on the progress of the fight against the pandemic,” he said on Thursday.

With over 2,000 coronavirus positive cases, 212 recoveries and 17 deaths to Covid-19, President Akufo-Addo also called for the cooperation of UTAG to “working side-by-side with the government, to make sure that we come out of this thing as intelligently and whole as possible.”

He took the opportunity to commend the ingenuity exhibited by Ghana’s higher learning institutions, in the face of the pandemic.

The University of Ghana on April 4, 2019 announced that it had successfully sequenced genomes of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for Covid-19 and obtained important information about the genetic composition of the viral strains in some confirmed cases in Ghana.

The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) together with a diagnostic company, Incas Diagnostics in Kumasi, have also developed Rapid Diagnostic Tests (RDT) for Covid-19 testing in a matter of minutes.

President of UTAG, Dr Charles Marfo, pledged the support of the universities to government’s initiatives through research.

“We will encourage our community to keep on working hard on what we do best, research. Because what we advise must come from an informed position,” he told the President.